Super Mario Party is the eleventh game in the franchise, and the first to launch on Nintendo Switch. Having just published our Super Mario Party review-in-progress, we decided to livestream a four-person match of one of the game's new modes.
In the video above, GameSpot senior technical video producer Erick Tay and video producer Joey Yee face off against editor Michael Higham and associate editor Jordan Ramee in a 10-turn game of Super Mario Party's Partner Party mode. The new mode is a reimagining of Mario Party 6's Team Battle, in which two-person teams face off in a race to gather the most Stars. In Partner Party, you're not limited to traveling along predetermined paths. Instead, you and your partner can travel independently from one another in almost any direction. Partners share resources--such as coins, Stars, and items--and need to work together to outwit their opponents.
Like Mario Party mode, you still play minigames between rounds. Super Mario Party has 80 minigames, most of which make use of the Joy-Con's motion control and rumble features. Perfect Fit, for example, has you and your partner twisting your Joy-Con controllers to match up oddly shaped pieces in a 3D version of Tetris. In Nut Cases, you and your partner need to gather more crates full of acorns than your opponents, and you can test to see how many nuts are inside each box by measuring the intensity of the Joy-Con controller's vibration.
Super Mario Party two other new modes are River Survival and Sound Stage. In River Survival, all four players work together to survive a trip down a dangerous river, playing Co-op minigames to earn more time to survive their journey downstream. For Sound Stage, all four players compete against one another in a series of Rhythm minigames, where perfectly timing certain actions--such as hitting a baseball or riding a horse--to the beat of a song earns you a higher score.
In our Super Mario Party review-in-progress, Jordan Ramee gave the game a 7/10, complimenting the new Partner Party, River Survival, and Sound Stage modes as "enjoyable alternatives to Mario Party mode." He likes how the game has you choose between unique character dice blocks and a normal six-sided die every turn, which implements a bit of strategy into a mechanic that's solely been dependent on chance for the past 20 years. Seeing "a game on Switch that actively prevents you from making use of the console's portability" is puzzling, though.
Super Mario Party launches on October 5 for Nintendo Switch.
